Speculation and Credit

The calamitous effects of unlucky speculation in the stock market and lottery is a recurring theme in the following prints. "Before and after" depictions of shareholders were a particular favorite—admonishing the viewer that fortunes made from speculation can be lost overnight.

Plate twenty-eight from Exercises d'Imagination de Différents Caractères et Formes Humaines . . . Augsburg, 1784–85, of which plates one to eighty-four were engraved by Brichet, and plates eighty-five to one hundred by Goez. A once well-dressed man is reduced to rags by bad speculation.

A funeral procession carries a coffin toward a grave, in front of which are a man and woman weeping. Translation of the German caption below image:
Great mourning and sorrow, grief and lamentation,
The best helper is now laid to rest.
Who do you think it is? Monsieur Credit is dead,
He who so often rescued you and me from distress.

A similar allegory to 55, with the caption: "Les mauvais payeurs l'ont tué." Pictured are an artist, a musician, and a soldier, who have killed another man, lying at their feet. This image inspired many provincial copies, notably at Épinal.

A rare German version of one of the seventy-four plates usually found in the popular Dutch satirical volume, Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid (The Great Mirror of Folly). It commemorates the period of speculative mania which swept France, England, and Holland in the year 1720. Pictured here is the inner court of the old Amsterdam exchange (see 66), where distraught shareholders are calling out, "I am ruined; Who will loan me money? I am still living on hope; I cannot sleep," etc. The term "Wind-Handel" was often used satirically to connote the flimsiness of the stocks being traded.